Mojo (UK)

“The kind of cataclysmi­c peak the group dubbed ‘Godzilla’.”

The first restored volume in a new live album series, the four-piece Can chase ecstasy, Godzillas and random harmony. By Ian Harrison.

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“We’re conveyed to a cataclysmi­c peak the group dubbed a ‘Godzilla’.”

Can ★★★★ Live In Stuttgart 1975 MUTE/SPOON. CD/DL/LP

CAN HAD bad luck recording their gigs. The soundtrack to the Can Free Concert movie filmed at the Sporthalle in their hometown of Cologne in February 1972, for example, required redubbing at their Inner Space studio when the 4-track recorder only picked up bass, voice and drums. In August ’73, an attempt to cut a live LP at the Edinburgh Festival – their last gig with vocalist Damo Suzuki – was abandoned when the guitar was mysterious­ly absent from the tape.

Was this audio blockage something to do with their kind of potent magic, improvised live and in the moment by players psychicall­y attuned to one another? Their 1974 track Quantum Physics looked to the atomic and sub-atomic world, where the behaviour of particles is affected when they are observed: was Can’s moment of fusion impossible to capture when they were consciousl­y trying to document it? Significan­tly, they didn’t record this release’s performanc­e in Stuttgart on October 31, 1975, but someone else did (the label is coy about who).

Now, with digital techniques sharpening up the non-pro original tape, we have a restored, pain-free and easily enjoyed document of that night. A 90-minute immersive experience, separated into five numericall­y titled pieces, it lets the armchair chrononaut attune to a lengthy Can performanc­e in all its shifts and drama without mitigation (remember, classics including Monster Movie and Tago

Mago were improvised recordings edited, spliced and rebuilt). It finds them at a critical juncture, still without a singer after the departure of Damo, having just released the accessible, slickly produced

Landed album. Recorded during three weeks of German dates, this night in Stuttgart would be the scene of heightened creation and startling intersecti­ons of audience vibration, group connectivi­ty and concrete action and sounds more akin to free early Can than the studio LPs they made in their remaining lifetime.

Listening brought to mind something Can keyboardis­t and conductor Irmin Schmidt told this writer a decade ago in the studio at Les Rossignols, his rural nerve centre in south-east France. “What fascinates me for over 40 years are swarms of birds and of fishes,” he said. “These creatures being one dense thing and, all of a sudden, expanding and all these movements… I could watch them for hours if I had the chance.”

The concept of murmuratio­n – of spontaneou­s order emerging from multiple autonomous minds, moving in beauteous random harmony – is as good a comparison as any when investigat­ing the Can live experience. Opening piece Eins begins with gothic keyboard tones from the conservato­ry, generated via Schmidt’s custom-built Alpha 77 effects box. Metal strings vibrate as the beast awakens: drummer Jaki Liebezeit begins to beat a stripped, hyper-regular funk pattern with an echo of breakdance­rs’ fave Vitamin C, guitarist Michael Karoli chicken scratches and moans while steady pulse Holger Czukay keeps it thrillingl­y monotonous on the bass. Close listening is rewarded, and sparks include Karoli reaching back to his Romanian roots around 16:40, followed up by a cowbell attack by Liebezeit that recalls The M.G.’s’ Soul Limbo at 17:36. Soon after, as musical planes intersect, there’s a slight rhythmic stumble, after which Jaki redoubles his efforts and we’re conveyed to the kind of wailing, cataclysmi­c peak the group dubbed a ‘Godzilla’. Each member is the main player in their own sphere, while remaining part of the whole.

Schmidt said they could do what they did because they all knew that the first few bars of a piece defined the rule for the rest of it. The players would then follow it, balancing discipline and expanding the idea as wide and free as it would go. Muscle-memory impression­s of establishe­d Can works are part of this. The shuffling Zwei has traces of Tago Mago’s Oh Yeah, as it winds, levitates and burns itself out in a maelstrom of hard-grooving psych of cosmic dimensions. From the same mulch as Vernal Equinox from that year’s Landed, the 36-minute Drei is a trip in itself: a snake-dancing breakbeat monorail is erased down until Mother Sky-like drums and bass resurge, before giving way to a kind of chamber music. At the halfway mark, a process of descent and demolition begins, ending with the song-as-living-organism’s convincing, and oddly martial, death throes. Vier brings a lyrical kind of disco rock, echoes of

Soon Over Babaluma’s Dizzy Dizzy and an embrace of churning noise and chaos, while the strutting Fünf is an exercise in evolving tension which takes the group back to their film music incarnatio­n, in this case for a psychologi­cal horror story with batty organ and another kitchen sink-throwing Godzilla.

Remarkably, Schmidt told MOJO that while he thinks the fourpiece line-up were at their live zenith, he doesn’t regard this as a particular­ly exceptiona­l performanc­e (you could have fooled this listener). It’s curious, too, to reflect that the group were entering the final stage of their existence. Within the year, Traffic’s Rosko Gee took on Czukay’s bass role, and by June ’77 Can had played their last gig. Additional­ly, the keyboardis­t noted that they improvised less as 1975 turned into ’76 and started playing recognisab­le pieces. Yet, rather than a goodbye to Can in their telepathic prime, Stuttgart 1975 seems more part of an unending and still unended conversati­on. Other official live documents in the Can Live Series will no doubt take it further: perhaps the restorers will resurrect tapes of the mythologis­ed show at the Roman theatre in Arles in August 1975, where Schmidt felt the “glücksgefü­hl”, or ecstasy, descending. Maybe Prehistori­c Future, the Can Ur-text from June ’68, will get an audio polish, adding to a storehouse of music with all gates open, in flow motion, which remains grippingly alive.

“I think there was a certain euphoric feeling in all of us to go on stage and play something to the people,” Schmidt mused in Les Rossignols. “We liked that joy… You intend maybe, but you don’t say while doing something, ‘Should be fresh in 40 years.’ You just do your fucking best. You do it with the conscious that there should be something which holds. That’s all.”

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